Monday, July 25, 2011

Einhorn’s $200 million purchase of a 33 percent stake in the money-losing Mets franchise is structured as a loan—with the hedge-fund investor getting paid back in three years and having his stake reduced to about 16 percent.

JPMorgan Chase, which is owed about $500 million by the team, won’t approve such a deal unless its loans get serviced—repaid or restructured—prior to Einhorn.

In addition to objecting to the Einhorn deal, in the last few months the bank wrote a “tough” ...

Sunday, July 24, 2011

On May 15, 1948, the Philadelphia Athletics took on the New York Yankees in a doubleheader. What’s significant is not that the A’s, who finished a surprising fourth in the American League, swept the Yankees in New York, 3-1 and 8-6. After all, the Yankees were in a down year and finished in third place.

On that Saturday afternoon before 69, 416 fans, Yogi Berra caught both ends of the double dip for the first of what would eventually be 117 times. Berra had an atypical offensive day. He ...

The HOF inductions start at 12:30 on MLB Network, and if this is up by then you can use this as a chatter. Here, by the way, is the Clark Sports Center, where the inductions are held (as you can see, when it’s not used for inductions it is, well, a actual sports center with softball, soccer, etc.)

Or as the chicken parmigiant Michael the K said yesterday…“It looks like Jemile Weeks goes to the same barber as his brother.” (in-studio stale Snicker bars abound)

Morgan was simply a disgrace in center field Friday night, at least by modern-day standards. The bleacher fans were riding him, as is their custom with most any opposing outfielder, and Morgan heard every word. He routinely engaged them with words and sweeping gestures, at least one of them carrying the hint of malice, and created ...

And for this, the MLB Network pays him how much? (reaches for dusty “BOWA GOTTA GOWA” sign)

Still, Bowa said he’s not sure whether he’d like to return to the field as a manager or coach, even though he looked fit and probably 10 years younger than his age.

“I like what I’m doing,” he said. “I don’t like the way a lot of people approach the game now. I don’t want to categorize everybody, but there are a lot of general managers who throw everything into a computer and then try to pick their ...

Sorry if I didn’t post it the right way. I thought this was kind of interesting and was wondering what people here might think.

Once upon a time, sabermetrics was an interesting field. Better, it meant something. Those curious about how baseball worked were lifting the veil and understanding the mechanics of the game. New metrics were developed that gave us a better idea of not only what a player was worth but how to puzzle that particular question out. Following the logic behind the new wave ...

A quarter century ago, Mets manager Davey Johnson got stuck in an unenviable position: He ran out of position players before he ran out of game. Ejections and pinch hits forced him to get creative, as the Mets somehow managed to prevail over the Reds in 14 innings. ...

So Carter at third, and Hearn at the backstop. Who replaces Mitchell in the outfield?

Here’s where Johnson gets really creative. He has a southpaw pitcher in the ...

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the number of ejections in the past 10 years has actually increased with the rising summer temperatures. Using information from Stats LLC, the study concluded that temperatures below 50 degrees yield just 5.8 ejections for every 100 games played in that weather from 2001 to 2011. From there, the average total goes up to 7.2 ejections every 100 games played in temperatures between 50 and 59 degrees, 8.4 in games between 60 and 69 degrees, 8.6 in games ...

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Look, I don’t have time to goof on this…I’m too busy goofing on Spotify!

For instance, in the aftermath of Texas Rangers’ third baseman Adrian Beltre’s hamstring injury, which has landed him on the disabled list, Richard Durrett writes for ESPN.com:

Perhaps the best measurement of Beltre’s worth is Wins Above Replacement or WAR. Basically, it looks at the wins a player adds above what a “replacement level” player would do. ESPN Stats & Information (shout out Joshua Kritz) tells me ...

Still, if pressed, my list of the top 10 second basemen of all-time would probably look like this:

1. Eddie Collins

2. Joe Morgan

3. Rogers Hornsby

4. Nap Lajoie

5. Charlie Gehringer

6. Frankie Frisch

7. Roberto Alomar

8. Ryne Sandberg

9. Bobby Grich

10. Lou Whitaker

That would make Alomar the second-best second baseman since integration and the seventh-best second baseman in the game’s 140-year history. Your list may differ, but no matter how you shuffle those rankings, Alomar’s ...

Image of the Day has returned for a special run, as we’ll see images of Baseball parks… FROM OUTER SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCCCCCCEEE!

Today is Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Mass. Many of you are probably familiar with it, at least passingly, and anybody who isn’t should be able to figure out what is so unusual about it by looking at this satellite image.

From comments…“Conine is simply pissed off that he is no longer the greatest Marlins player ever.”

Does Jeff Conine get frustrated by Hanley Ramirez?

“On a nightly basis.’’

Because?

“I just, I don’t know, I think that obviously Hanley is a phenomenal talent. But as a guy that… I’m probably jealous too because I didn’t have that kind of talent but I had to work extremely hard on a nightly basis to put my talent on the field . I think that there are some nights when he ...

“It’s the most curious case I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “And frustrating. The lesson is to be very careful with Japanese pitchers. I give him credit for living a dream and for fighting the fight. It can’t be easy. It has to bother him, too.”

Cashman added, “He does things his own way.”

Like commuting to and from Manhattan.

“Yeah, he’s passed me on the drive down to Trenton,” Cashman said. “He drives faster than his ...

“I don’t know what the problem is with hitters today,” Rose said. “Man, there are so many guys who are swinging at balls bouncing in the dirt, so many guys hitting .230, .245. It’s hard to believe that (Derek) Jeter and Ichiro (Suzuki) are both batting under .270.”

...The one issue on which Rose did not have an opinion was whether players from the steroid era ought to be excluded, like him, from the Hall.

In the case of Jesus Montero, I think we are now getting enough data to see what others may have missed.

...The four year trend line is headed straight down in OBP, SLG, wOBA and wRC+. As the competition he’s faced has improved, the concerns about plate discipline and pitchers exploiting his aggressiveness have come to pass. Since peaking in High-A in 2009 his results have gone down annually when you look at his advanced numbers. This is not one bad season, its a manifestation of an ...

Players aren’t inducted for being versatile and sticking around into their mid-40s. Good thing Omar Vizquel can hit too. The last remaining player who made his debut in the 1980s, the 44-year-old shortstop could reach 3,000 hits if he sticks around a few more seasons. He also has won 11 Gold Gloves and has played every infield position.

Voters from 1980, you were idiots. And you people didn’t get a lot smarter. Over time Santo received more support, but never enough to get into the Hall. Never close to enough. Needing 75 percent of the BBWAA votes to get in, he topped out at 43.1 percent in 1998, his offensive numbers from the pitching-dominated 1960s obscured by the cartoonish steroid era that was in full bloom in the late 1990s—and his defensive contributions simply ignored, I guess. ...Read More...

The only one that maybe compared came when Blyleven was with Pittsburgh and threw a two-strike curve in St. Louis one day to catcher Terry Kennedy, who was a lefty, “and he swung at it at the last second, like he was chopping wood,” Blyleven recalls. “Thank goodness it was the last out, because it made everybody laugh, not only on our team, but on their team.

“It was strike three, third out, so I went back to the bench, put a jacket on and looked over at their dugout and they were still ...

Friday, July 22, 2011

whenever we use a skill-based metric like xFIP or SIERA….We are using a proxy for regression to the mean that doesn’t explicitly account for the amount of playing time a pitcher has had. We are, in essence, trusting in the formula to do the right amount of regression for us. And like using fly balls to predict home runs, the regression to the mean we see is a side effect, not anything intentional.

Detroit Tigers broadcaster Rod Allen made an unfunny and inappropriate attempt at a joke about Latinos during Fox Sports Detroit’s telecast Thursday night.

Allen, a color analyst since 2003, said the postgame meal in the Tigers clubhouse at Target Field should include rice and beans, because most of the team’s lineup against the Twins had Latino heritage.

You see, the Latinos just love them some rice and beans, as the stereotype goes.

The atmosphere should be electric this weekend when the Pirates host the St. Louis Cardinals in a three-game series between National League Central contenders that begins tonight at PNC Park.
Only a few tickets remain for games tonight and Saturday night. Sunday afternoon’s series finale is also likely to sell out. There is no doubting that the Pirates are not only the hot story on the Pittsburgh sporting scene but in all of baseball as they continue to be surprise contenders following a run of ...

More posters have been revealed and this time for some interesting films. First off is the baseball dramedy MONEYBALL, starring Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman and directed by Bennett Miller. Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s back in 2002 most known for using a modern analytical system to draft players. The poster is actually pretty lame and reminds me a little too much of FIELD OF DREAMS. However, the basic point ...

“You look at the new age that we are in with the Facebook and (Twitter) and the online, all that stuff is very important, because I think, as writers that do vote, that is your job to look at numbers,” Blyleven said. “And that is what I think Rich Lederer brought out. He brought my numbers out a lot more.”

Jon Weisman of the DodgerThoughts.com blog called Lederer’s achievement “the most effective grass-roots campaigns for ...